Make a Difference This Holiday Season

With all the hustle and bustle of the holidays, it’s easy for us to forget how important it is for us to take time to advocate for the profession. We need as many letters as possible sent to Congress to avoid the impending 3.37% cut to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule slated for January 1, 2024. If you want to learn more about the issue, read this article. We encourage you, your co-workers, staff, family, friends, and most importantly, your patients to take action using the Patient Action Center this holiday season.

It’s that time of year to mark your calendars for the 2024 APTA Capitol Hill Day that will take place April 14-16 in Washington D.C. Participants will receive advocacy training starting the morning of April 15^th and meet with members of Congress on April 16^th. More details are coming soon, and we hope you will save the date to advocate.

Let’s all have a New Year’s resolution this upcoming year to join our advocacy network. Only 12% of our association are part of our grassroots. Help advance the profession in 2024 by signing up today.

Contact Eva Norman, PT, DPT at [email protected] if you have any questions or want to get more involved!

Happy Holidays!

Showcase your innovations at the First Annual Physical Therapy Shark Tank

Save the Date! The APTA Academy of Leadership and Innovation with Innovation Lab present The  1^st Physical Therapy Shark Tank on Tuesday, January 30, 2024 at 2:30-3:30pm EST. 

Here’s your chance to dive deep into PT innovation! Are you a game-changer in the world of physical therapy? Are you developing groundbreaking products and solutions that can revolutionize the field? Showcase your innovations at the First Annual Physical Therapy Shark Tank, January 30, 2024.

The Grand Prize: $25,000 in Innovation Lab Services! Winner revealed in-person at APTA Combined Sections Meeting in Boston on Feb 14, 2024.

1. Jaime Stoffer, PT, DPT, MBA (Medline)
2. Drew Contreras, PT, DPT, SCS (APTA)
3. David Putrino, PT, PhD (Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for Mount Sinai Health System-and implementation of clinical trials for novel technologies)
4. Judy Deutsch, PT, PhD (APTA TechSIG and Professor, Rutgers University)
5. Conor Walsh, PhD (Professor, Harvard University)

The link to details:  https://www.aptaali.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1796008

Home Health Providers Must Lean Into Mitigation Strategies To Combat CMS Cuts

Home Health Care News | By Joyce Famakinwa
 
It’s been almost a month since the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the CY 2024 home health payment rule, and providers and industry stakeholders are still critical of the federal agency’s misconceptions about home health.
 
With cuts coming, operators must lean on mitigation strategies to prepare. That’s one key takeaway from a recent webinar hosted by home-based care technology company Axxess. 
In the wake of the final payment rule, industry players made waves for calling out what they viewed as CMS’ “dismissive” position when it comes to data and evidence provided by home health companies and advocacy groups.
 
Along these lines, some in the industry also believe that CMS has a distorted view of the home health’s profits based on faulty data. 
 
“They have a very clear picture of an industry that they believe is getting significantly overpaid, and is just rolling in the profits, which is why they don’t seem to care about the rate cuts,” Robert Markette, a health law attorney with Hall, Render, Killian, Heath and Lyman, said during the webinar. “Their data doesn’t reflect reality, and their data comes out of flawed cost reporting, primarily, and then whatever MedPAC does to get their numbers.”
 
Markette noted that CMS data paints a picture of reimbursement on Medicare exceeding home health costs by 45%. The federal agency’s data also has home health costs in 2022 decreasing by 2.9%, and average margins across the industry checking in at 24.9%.
 
“Last year, they did not impose the entire permanent cut, which means they’re going to have to consider a temporary cut in the future, and each year they tell us that temporary cut will get larger, and they don’t see that as a problem because they think we’re making these huge profits,” Markette said. “We have to deal with that math problem.” 
 
Although providers are still reacting to the final rule, it’s important to begin strategizing to lessen the impact of potential headwinds…

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Beyond The Cuts: What Else Home Health Providers Need To Know About CMS’ 2024 Final Rule

Home Health Care News | By Patrick Filbin
 
Nearly a month after the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released its CY 2024 final payment rule, the ins and outs of it have become more apparent. And there’s more to delve into than just blanket rate cuts.
 
Aside from the headline-grabbing 0.8% aggregate payment increase and the permanent prospective adjustment of -2.890%, there are dozens of other notable changes to home health care that providers should be aware of.
 
HHVBP program
 
More changes to the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) model are in order.
More specifically, CMS is attempting to simplify performance scores.
 
“They’ve replaced the two normalized composite measures around self-care and mobility with a discharge function score,” Joseph Brence, head of clinical strategy for MedBridge, told Home Health Care News. “Additionally, the discharge community measure has been replaced with the discharge to community post-acute measure. These changes should make it easier for agencies to understand their performance without waiting for internal performance reports.”
 
Another positive change in value-based purchasing Brence laid out is replacing the acute care hospitalization measure – during the first 60 days of home health use – with the potentially preventable hospitalization measure.
 
By shifting to the latter, CMS is instead putting the focus on hospitalizations and ED usage that a home health agency would have been able to avoid. Today, an agency would be penalized every time a patient goes to the emergency room or is admitted to the hospital.
 
This change is narrowing the focus to what home health agencies can actually prevent, Brence said.
 
“That is a win for home health agencies,” Brence said. “So the attention and changes to how value-based purchasing is assessed does benefit the home health setting.”
 
Wage index, labor portion updates
 
From a revenue perspective, agencies can’t take the 0.8% increase at face value. One of the major updates every year in the final rule is the wage index value updates.
 
The wage index determines Medicare payments for home health services and is part of the calculation used by CMS to adjust payments based on regional variations in labor costs.
The wage index reflects the relative wage levels in the area where a home health agency is located.
 
There are over 450 Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) codes that get updated every year.
A majority of those codes — 59% — had a negative change in the final rule. Of those, 22.7% had a negative impact of over 3%.
 
“If you’re looking at agencies that are thinking, ‘Alright, we’re at least going to have a higher rate for next year, so we should be in the black when we do an apples-to-apples comparison,’” Nick Seabrook, managing principal and SVP of consulting at SimiTree, told HHCN. “Well, that might not necessarily be the case, based on the fact that the wage index values are going down.”
 
On the flip side, there were 38% that had a positive change — 10.8% had a change of 3% or higher…

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